CPSP researchers have created a historical version of the Census' and Bureau of Labor Statistics' Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which dates back to 1967. The SPM improves upon official poverty statistics by taking a fuller accounting of the resources that families have at their disposal. As such, it is a useful tool for analyzing the effects of social policies on the lives of low-income families.
The Data User Guide provides information about the data sources used to construct the historical SPM series and a description of each SPM-related variable present in the public-use SPM data. The steps for constructing linking variables that can be used to merge the historical SPM data with raw CPS data are also presented in the guide.
Contact the Columbia SPM project team at [email protected] if you have any questions regarding our data. For questions about our methods for constructing or imputing variables, we ask that users please first reference Fox et al. (2015) as these are captured with great detail in both the body and technical appendix of this publication. The methods used to construct the geographic adjustments for the SPM can be found in Nolan et al. (2016).
Suggested Data Citation:
Wimer, Christopher, Liana Fox, Sophie Collyer, Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, Jennifer Laird, Jaehyun Nam, Laura Nolan, Jessica Pac, Ryan Vinh, and Jane Waldfogel. 2024. Historical Supplemental Poverty Measure data. New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University.
Last updated on September 05, 2025